Get Involved

Read about how to assist this project develop, by registering for an account and becoming a contributor documenting local street history.

Available soon

My House My Street is currently in test mode and does not yet offer automated registration. If you would like to register for an account and participate as a contributor, please go to the login page and complete the new user form.

Introduction

Census Document

There are many sources of information that a researcher can turn to, when looking to document the history of a home. The objective behind the MyHouseMyStreet initiative is not to highlight all of these or provide an online environment where all such resources can be managed. Rather, MyHouseMyStreet exists to focus users on two sorts of information, street/trade directories and census documentation*.

These sources are generally easy to locate in local history centers and simple to understand. Furthermore, they provide data on perhaps that most interesting of issues, the people who have occupied your home in the past.

Process

Street Directory

Contributors to MyHouseMyStreet start by identifying the relevant directories and census documents for their street.

They then type the textural content of these documents into Excel spreadsheets that we have specially prepared and formatted to make this task easy. Contributors access these spreadsheets via this website once they have registered with MyHouseMyStreet.

Once the Excel sheets have been completed, they are placed online, where they can be reviewed and edited if necessary. Thereafter, the information is extracted from the Excel sheets and placed into the project's central database where it is used to create the occupancy listings that are made available to the public via the Explore area of the website.

For more information about how the system works and how contributors interact with it, take a look at our Introductory Video.

* Census data is generally available from 1841 - 1901 (with the 1911 records due for imminent release); more recent years cannot be access due to confidentiality issues. Street and trade directories are generally available for UK locations as far back as the early to mid-19th century and are produced until late in the 20th century.

Researchers can use other resources, such as tax books, to develop a more sophisticated record of a property and learn about past owners, mortgagees, etc. We may develop MHMS to facillitate work with these record types in due course. At present though, we are focusing on simple documents that can quickly and easily let you build up a picture of who lived in your home and the type of work those people were engaged with.